far worse than love or hell
by Yui Miyamoto
Summary: Sasuke writes his most precious memory before he loses his own sanity… (Note: Shounen ai between brothers.)


**Fandom: Naruto**  
**Title: far worse than love or hell.**  
**Rating: pg**  
**Pairing: Itachi + Sasuke**  
**Description – Sasuke writes his most precious memory before he loses his own sanity…**  
**(Note: Shounen ai between brothers.)**

**Disclaimer – Naruto isn't mine.**

Fading in and out.  
An eye that is as red as an  
unwanted moon,  
bringing nothing but misfortune  
at its single, yet rare appearance.

**far worse than love or hell.  
By miyamoto yui**

_I don't understand him.  
I don't think I am ever meant to._

As the moonlight pours into the room and onto my desk, I'm fighting with the darkness inside and outside of myself. I find myself pushing the picture of my teammates and my beloved sensei onto the wooden desk. The frame and the desktop touch one another quietly, but it seems so abrupt as it's swallowed up in the muted state I find within myself and the tension inside my own room.  
I refuse to cry. I am too stubborn to ask for anything more and I'm only too willing to do anything that will help me in my ultimate goal.

But I have to put down that single picture of the only happiness I've known since that day. I can't bear to look at it right now.

And so, I have to write my most important thing onto several pieces of paper so that if I ever forget, then this will be the keeper of what's left of my mind. Ironically, I only have time to write one. I can only bear writing through one. One long story that captures everything.  
It seems too stupid, though. Even for me.

I've always been quiet and why would I want to remember anything at all?

I pat the picture frame and smile a bit.

"While I'm still here…While Uchiha Sasuke resides here…" I mumble to myself, disturbed by the grave tone my voice suddenly took a hold of.

And so, the smirk I wore as I proudly touched that frame suddenly blew out faster than a tiny flame in the wind. That's how my happiness was to me.  
It didn't matter what I would do in the future. I would always watch the past with a careful and critical eye.

This supposed smile was nothing compared to what it was then.

Yes…  
After all, my happiness didn't reside in this current time or place.

With the way things are now, I wondered if it happened to the same person. We share the same scars but they have different meanings now. Time embeds them in a place where no one else can touch. Not even yourself.  
And you were the one that experienced it. They were yours…

"It's crazy." I comment to myself as I keep the brush poised between my fingers.

I'm ready to write, but I'm so scared to record it. I'll be held accountable for it.

I sigh while looking at the paper and the two lines already written on it. "It's because of what that woman said. If I didn't pass by and heard what she said, I wouldn't be here thinking about all this nonsense."

If it weren't for the fact that this random comment answered the countless questions I had in my head associated to this single theme, then I wouldn't have had to live through this single event all over again. I wouldn't have had felt the need to remember a time that I debated on whether it was worth fighting for.

I don't know what to believe anymore…

_"Somewhere else, those 'useless' feelings will continue. It is because they're forever preserved and embedded in time itself."_

_I don't get it. I don't get it at all._

_He used to sit by the edge of the 'pier' and stare blankly into the river. He used to go there whenever he needed to think. I never knew what was so fascinating about watching the slow river go by, but I never questioned him._

_He knew EVERYTHING.  
If he told me that our blades were made by pressing a million leaves together, then I would have believed it._

_Even though he made fun of me, even though he beat me up once in a while, even though he looked at me with indifference, I never questioned the fact that he cared about me. I would act like it, but that's how kids are when they don't get what they want or all the attention they crave from that special person._

_I would occasionally follow behind him as if I were stalking him. From tree to tree and wall to wall, my eyes would never leave his._

_It was as if we were at home. I always found myself drawn to looking at him._

_And he would play along with me. He would go about his business as if he didn't know that I was there. At the time, he pretended to pay attention to everything else except me. I would sometimes laugh with my hands over my mouth and blink with a twinkle in my eye. "Aniki doesn't know I'm here! I'll be a better ninja than him someday if he can't see me!"_

_There was a time when I lost him. And out of nowhere, as I grabbed onto the wall in front of me, he swiftly got in back of me. From behind, he lifted me off the ground and held my waist. Lifting me up, his lips touched my ear as he flatly told me, "Are you looking for me, brat?"  
His breath was so warm that my ear tingled, but that was a split-second before I started to laugh because I was ticklish around the waist. I wriggled in his arms as he held me for a moment. "Admit it, Sasuke."  
"No, I'm not!" I laughed even harder.  
He finally let me go and as he strolled walked ahead of me while heading home, I grabbed onto his sleeve with my fingers._

_"You're troublesome," he simply commented._

_But that was the only way he expressed himself to me. That might have been the best way for him to admit to caring about me._

_I remember that day not because he touched me voluntarily besides the head poking, but because it never happened again. After that day, my brother was called off into missions. The more he left the house, the more I didn't see him. The remnants of his presence were always there though._

_Father made sure to make his comments about the 'better' son and I continued to let things go through one ear and pass through out of the other one._

_I couldn't hate my brother for it. He was really that promising of a student in anything he did.  
I envied his talent._

_But there was one night when he was supposed to come home. And even though I wasn't supposed to, in the middle of the night, I left our house to go by the river. For some odd reason, I had a feeling he would be there. I had a feeling he was calling out to me._

_"Don't come near me," you told me as you watched the water without turning your head.  
Your words pierced into the frigid air and froze them into breaths that could burn my skin._

_My whole body shivered at the severity of those four words.  
All the sarcastic wittiness was gone. These words were cold, empty, and emotionless._

_They served as a warning._

_"What's wrong, Aniki?" I took a timid step forward as the pier creaked under my feet._

_"Go back home, Sasuke."_

_This voice was desperate. It made me scared.  
Where was my confident and arrogant brother?_

_I didn't listen to him and slowly kept on stepping forward, but with each step, my feet felt very heavy. My legs wanted to give in and stop, but the words he said and the ones he didn't were very strong while opposing one another in depth and meaning._

_But deep inside, I still felt him calling to me._

_"Blood…" I mumbled as I got closer to him and when I was two feet away, he sharply scolded, "Why are you so stubborn, Sasuke? I will go home right after you. Go away~!"_

_Don't tell me things like that…_

_My heart broke as he said that to me. Instead of running away, I put my arms around his neck and held on with my eyes closed. I expected him to throw me away or something, but he didn't say anything._

_"Don't tell me to go, Aniki…" I sniffed as I found myself crying. I shook my head and buried my head onto his back._

_He sat there frozen, caught between anger and confusion. His silence made me hug him even tighter.  
The words I couldn't say or of the things I couldn't understand at that particular time were crunching deep into my heart._

_You were so sad and troubled. And I wanted to take that way._

_My Aniki couldn't have felt such emotions. He could do anything. He could live through anything. There was nothing that could penetrate into him…_

_…nothing else except me.  
And selfishly, I wanted it to always remain that way._

_"To be strong means nothing when there's no purpose," he said to himself. "It doesn't matter if it's wrong or right in everyone else's eyes, but if you don't even know…I don't know what I'm saying, Sasuke."_

_I kissed the back of his head. "Aniki…"_

_"Aren't you scared of your brother with all this blood from his first real mission?" he chuckled to himself with self-mockery painted all over each individual laugh._

_It poked my heart and turned it into ashes. I didn't know what to do or how to react.  
He always said things I didn't understand. He always did things that I could feel out their definitions, but they were never anything direct. Or was I too slow or young to understand?_

_I shook my head. "No. No matter what. Aniki is Aniki to me. I'll love Aniki through aaanything.~"_

_"You might regret those words."_

_"Why?"_

_"Because that means you sealed your soul to me."_

_"My soul?"_

_"That part of you that makes you human and whole."_

_"Then that's okay." I hugged him even more and smiled._

_"Why is that, Sasuke?"_

_"Aniki, I already gave that to you." Then, I laughed. "Remember I wrote it down?"_

_His smirk…  
It was always something very demented, but beautiful to me._

_At that moment, he took out a small pouch onto his lap. I watched what he was doing over his shoulder with both of my arms still wrapped around his neck.  
He took out its contents and unfolded the paper I wrote when I was three and was joking around with him. I gave it to him as a birthday present because I had learned to write my name._

_He took my finger, pushed it onto the blood over his heart, and pressed it on the paper._

_Then, he licked my finger.  
I turned red because he never touched me like that before, but it felt so nice…_

_Afterwards, he put the contents back and hid it back into his black uniform which was smeared with someone else's and his own blood._

_"I'll hold you to this for the rest of your life."_

_"I love you, Aniki…" I softly said into his ear while falling asleep out of exhaustion._

_No matter what…  
I never wanted to believe that he could hate me._

_Not even when he glared at me…  
Not even when our parents were dying at his feet…_

_I understood him when flashbacks came to me of harming people during the exam when my body was taken over by Orochimaru,  
of how twisted he had to become after graduating the academy at so young an age,  
of how much it took to accept everything from responsibility at home to everyone's expectations,  
of how high he wanted to go with his life…_

_all that planning and all our idealism…_

_…encompassed into the grief he carried._

_All in the name of 'strength'._

_**And all that work meant to learn how to kill.**_

But I was already too far to stop now.

I put down my brush and took a deep breath. I got up and hid the papers somewhere. Then, I took one last look at the photograph.

I looked at everything in the darkness. I took one last glance at all that I was leaving behind.  
"There's a promise I have to fulfill. And it means more than life, death, being damned, or being saved."

Click.  
I locked the door and left.

I don't fight for the Sasuke of today, but for the one of yesterday.  
I hope I'll come back and continue where I left off, somehow.

I thought of that demon fox's eyes and pretended that they were already glaring at me for what I was going to do. You always reminded me of my Aniki, did you know that?

_"Your eyes…"_

_For a moment, the brother who was unfazed and kept his composure through everything was briefly broken. The worry that had risen in his face was short-lived and it became calm once more._

_It became decisive._

_"Let it end with me, Sasuke. Don't let the sharingan take over your life."_

'Live your life as you see fit' was what you wanted to say, right?  
Only now do I realize it.

But as I turn away from a crying Sakura and head onward, I keep on thinking, "How can you ask that of me when all you did was try to keep me close to you?

How can I possibly live my life without you?

Either way leads to the same destination:  
I will die without you or I will be killed by you."

But know this, Aniki, when I gave you my soul, you were cursed for the rest of your life. If you looked at anything else besides me,

I would destroy you myself.

It's more than me realizing that I fell in love with someone I would be damned far worse for than the mark of Orochimaru circulating through my body…

What would you really say about someone else touching me?

I smiled as I ran faster and faster.

Aren't I the real reason why you killed the whole village?

So, how could I look elsewhere for someone who would do so much for me? You worried over nothing…

You foolish Aniki…

I chuckled to myself and felt the sharingan warming my body,  
burning it from the inside out.

That look that troubled me whenever you sat by the river, it now makes perfect sense.

"There are things far worse than love or hell."

**Owari.**

**Author's notes:** Even though this is not as sexy as my friend Niko would like it, since it is Good Friday and this is my apology for keeping you up, here is a fic I've been fiddling with inside of my head. It was just something that struck my fancy.  
I just wanted to capture a twisted Sasuke. You know me and psychos. I love them!

Love,  
Yui

Friday, March 25, 2005  
4:10:41 AM


End file.
